Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II

Back on the trail with their duffle bags and nets like a gang of nocturnal lepidopterists, the trio of Oren Ambarchi on guitar, Johan Berthling on bass and Andreas Werliin on drums pick up pretty much where their first Ghosted album left off, replacing its kosmische chug and post-rock fabrics with something a little more spectral. Switching out the Roman numerals for Berthling and Werliin’s native Swedish, ‘en’ opens Ghosted II with rattle-stick percussion, drags of bass and the shapeshifting smears of Ambarchi’s guitar, which over the course of the album morphs and twists through gossamer strings and all manner of eighties synthesizers. Settling into a tremulous spread of guitar over a strident bass line, the bass and drums work together to establish a tensile mesh which undergirds the careening course of Ambarchi’s strings, like a car whose tail keeps spinning out as it barrels down the highway, its rear lights flashing in the gloaming. Werliin’s drums seem to gain momentum through the final passage of ‘en’ as the guitar winds down to a quaver.

Softer and almost tantalisingly pellucid, ‘två’ opens with a smooth pattern of harmonics on the bass, which is soon accompanied by the light touch of Werliin’s percussion, with its parched and brittle feel like sticks and twigs dried out for kindling. Serving to accentuate the graceful arc of the bass, Ambarchi’s guitar and effects create a hazy top note which hangs suspended over the rhythm, tentatively plucking at what lies beneath, seeking out shared sympathies or alternatively feeding off the incessant, silvery and slightly loping beat as if summoning the succour to sustain a new life force. Berthling and Werliin are masters at laying out these sort of looping and sonorous rhythms following their work with Mats Gustafsson, with the recent Fire! album Testament offering the same sense of boundlessness while a little more agricultural, running with bison, stretching out under starry skies or pulling apart a bar-room blues. Ambarchi’s amorphous and sometimes ethereal guitar is perfectly capable of mining the canyon, but for the most part on Ghosted II it offers something markedly different from Gustafsson’s stonking saxophone, at once spare and richly evocative as the trio erect the first structures and share the first limpid sensations of a new world.

Through the subtly shifting signatures and polyrhythms of Werliin’s percussion, by the close of ‘två’ the guitar is holding a scratched sine tone among other spurts and coiled or stray votive patterns. And after thirteen minutes in this fragrant, quasi-mystical headspace, woodblocks in the dying moments of ‘två’ remind us that there’s time to keep after all.

By contrast ‘tre’ is much beefier, bounding through the saloon doors with a resolute swagger and then placing its order with the clink of a bell. Clip-clop percussion and a funky bass line allow Ambarchi’s guitar to roam and wander, retaining some of that amorphous quality while sounding a little more viscous, as though coagulating or triangulating between the other instruments. Then at just over the halfway mark, playing pizzicato, he begins to conjure these shimmering arpeggiated pools as his six-string takes the aspect of a lute or lyre, providing ‘tre’ with a trance-like quality redolent of Dorothy Ashby or Anoushka Shankar, classical Indian raga or even in its looser moments flamenco music. Adding shakers and chimes to his chopping percussion, Werliin alongside Berthling on the bass stay absolutely locked, keys left dangling, into an incessant back-and-forth groove.

Through a swelling drone and a simple ascending pattern, the opening seconds of ‘fyra’ conjure up images of sloshing waves and furtive undertows, before Werliin counts off and kicks in, with his percussion propelling Ambarchi’s guitar into an arms-and-legs-akimbo squat across the screen, as Berthling’s spry bass resounds in the distance. Eventually the drums regain control of the tempo of the piece, with the guitar settling into a series of smudged arcs with crimped edges over Werliin’s sketched minimalist repetition. And as the percussion finally lays out, with minimal support from Berthling’s bass the guitar hollows and wafts through the air like the smoke and floating embers of so many charred woodwinds.